This is just a short experimental piece I made as part of an ongoing research project, but since I made it entirely in the last two weeks, I thought it'll be fun to post it for NaNoReno. The point of this project was to experiment with the player's control of verbal and nonverbal expressions of emotion in a conversation.

Looks like your the fist one to post a NaNoRenO for the year. I'll see what you got and all the others later. Right now, I should probably sleep, with everything I got to do I'll probably never finish mine in time. I probably should have collaborated.

"Sometimes...when there's no one around...I only step on the darker ones..." ~Hanako (Katawa Shoujo by 4Leaf Studios)
You know, I sometimes still do that.
This Act 1 portion is what hooked me on VNs, so I like to promote them.
Anything I write I post here Deviant Art

I found the text more helpful to interpret the emotional value of an answer, followed by the picture. The voice was much more ambiguous. But perhaps it could be made to be an interesting option, but it requires a lot of top quality voice acting.

This is a really interesting idea! It would be cool to see it implemented with longer reaching consequences.

For me, the voice and the text were pretty much on par with each other. The delivery for the voice was basically what I thought when I read the different texts. The facial expressions were most difficult. Sometimes I thought I was being nice, but she interpreted it as being uncaring instead.

Psychologists often seem to say that communication has only 20% to do with the words themselves, and that 80% of communication is actually nonverbal: facial expressions, tone, cadence of speech, gestures, etc. (Or something like that, anyway.)

It was interesting to see that idea tackled in a visual game, which normally only relies on text as a form of communication, when in reality, the whole body (and not just the words) is involved in face-to-face conversation. I had the easiest time predicting reactions with the text, followed by voice, and facial expression.

Well, I'm busy analyzing the results now, but it does seem as though I'm getting very mixed results, similar to what you guys have reported. Some people also had different interpretations of the choices, like you mentioned, sake-bento. Most people preferred either voice or text, and found the facial expressions a little hard to read, but that may actually be a cultural thing, or it could have been an experimental flaw because of the sprites I used. More exaggerated facial expressions were generally preferred. Unfortunately, I was working within a strict time limit and with no artist, so I could only go with what I had available. (Oh, the need for more Photoshop dolls...)

And yeah, there's definitely a lot more things that can be done, both story-wise and mechanic-wise to improve this game. This was just a small demonstration of the idea, but I'll be working on a larger, more complex implementation in the future. (Maybe sliders, instead of fixed choices, to allow for differences in emotional intensity. And a variety of different scenarios as well.) Still, it was a very interesting challenge as a writer, though... to weave a coherent scenario and meaningful choices that could take into account three different modes of communication. Feel free to use or expand on this idea in your own future stories!